[ANN] Gemini Mailing List gemini mirror

Brian Evans <b__m__e (a) mailfence.com>

Hi all,
Given all the recent activity on the mailing list I thought
it might be nice to see what is going on with the protocol
via the protocol itself.

I wrote a little scraper (woefully inefficient, but is getting the
job done) and have the results set to update on a CRON every
6 hours at this location:

gemini://rawtext.club:1965/~sloum/geminilist/

I'll be improving the output formatting of the posts themselves
over time, but it is pretty readable at present (I hope).

Enjoy!

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colecmac@protonmail.com <colecmac (a) protonmail.com>

Good idea, thanks! The only problem I see is that I can't
access the server right now ;)

Port 1965 seems to be closed?

makeworld

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Ecmel Berk CanlΔ±er <me (a) ecmelberk.com>

On Sun, 17 May 2020 04:21:05 +0200 (CEST)
Brian Evans <b__m__e at mailfence.com> wrote:
> I wrote a little scraper (woefully inefficient, but is getting the
> job done) and have the results set to update on a CRON every
> 6 hours at this location:

Wouldn't it be better to have a mail server scripted to write the mails
into files instead of a scraper? It would be almost real-time.

Or, just hook it up into an email account (say, your own) and listen
for new mails there? That wouldn't be as responsive as the above, but
~5 minutes are better than 6 hours IMO.

Just throwing out ideas, feel free to say no :)

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solderpunk <solderpunk (a) SDF.ORG>

On Sun, May 17, 2020 at 04:21:05AM +0200, Brian Evans wrote:

> Hi all,
> Given all the recent activity on the mailing list I thought
> it might be nice to see what is going on with the protocol
> via the protocol itself.

Great idea!  Obvious in retrospect, but congrats and thanks for actually
coming up with it and implementing it.  It will be great to be able to
link to previous discussion with gemini:// links
 
> gemini://rawtext.club:1965/~sloum/geminilist/

As somebody else reported, I can't connect right now but I guess that's
just a temporary issue at RTC.  I look forward to seeing this later.
Does it have nice thread-aware navigation?

Cheers,
Solderpunk

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solderpunk <solderpunk (a) SDF.ORG>

On Sun, May 17, 2020 at 09:30:12AM +0300, Ecmel Berk Canl?er wrote:
 
> Or, just hook it up into an email account (say, your own) and listen
> for new mails there? That wouldn't be as responsive as the above, but
> ~5 minutes are better than 6 hours IMO.

This approach seems a bit more flexible to me - it would allow setting
up a Gemini mirror for any mailing list under the sun, without needing
the list admin to do any work.

A tool that does this in a totally general / configurable way could be a
nice project if anybody is looking for one that isn't just another
client or server.

Cheers,
Solderpunk

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Ecmel Berk CanlΔ±er <me (a) ecmelberk.com>

On Sun, 17 May 2020 09:45:04 +0000
solderpunk <solderpunk at SDF.ORG> wrote:

> This approach seems a bit more flexible to me - it would allow setting
> up a Gemini mirror for any mailing list under the sun, without needing
> the list admin to do any work.

When I said mail server, I didn't mean the server of the list itself,
but creating a mail daemon configured to write any messages it
received, and subscribing to the list like any other account.

But there are still advantages of the latter approach, like not having
to host a mail daemon, as you can just create a mail account with any
of the tons of email providers, and poll for mails like a regular mail
client.

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Brian Evans <b__m__e (a) mailfence.com>

> Wouldn't it be better to have a mail server scripted to write the mails
> into files instead of a scraper? It would be almost real-time.

It might be. However, I know nothing about mail servers and do not wish to 
wade into those
waters at present. If you'd like to build it I would definitely love to 
check out the code and
visit the resulting gemini capsule :)

> ~5 minutes are better than 6 hours IMO.

The 6 hours was due to it being run on a resource limited system that is 
shared by other users.
However, now that it is caught up with the more than 400 messages for 
2020, it uses up a lot
less processing time and memory to just keep up with the current posts. I 
have updated the 
CRON job to every 20 minutes.

My thought is that the gemini version is meant to be read as a digest a 
time or two a day. Not to
be constantly refreshed for new updates. At elast, that is the use case I built it for.

> Just throwing out ideas, feel free to say no :)

I genuinely appreciate the ideas! I had not thought of the mailserver 
route. As said above, it isnt
an area I know about so will likely not pursue... but it IS very 
interesting and could be a really
cool way to build something similar. While it isnt 5 minutes, I hope the 
20 minute interval works
out better for you (and everyone).


It seems the server that I host through was down for a bit this morning 
(what may be afternoon
for many of you). It seems to be back up and cmccabe (the server admin) 
and I have been in touch
re: what happened. It seems there was a minor bug in the server code that 
has hopefully been
fixed. So if you didnt get a chance to check it out and wanted to, you 
should be able to now:

gemini://rawtext.club:1965/~sloum/geminilist/

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plugd <plugd (a) thelambdalab.xyz>

Hi Brian,

Brian Evans writes:
> So if you didnt get a chance to check it out and wanted to, you should be able to now:
>
> gemini://rawtext.club:1965/~sloum/geminilist/

Cool!  Just one issue: the gemini files you're serving for the emails
contain an unterminated ``` block.  (The terminating ``` characters are
actually there, but they're at the end of a line of text.  For example,
here's the header of one of Krixano's emails:

--- snip ---

=> gemini://rawtext.club/~sloum/geminilist/ <-- back to the mailing list
# Cognitive aspects of navigation in gemini space

Krixano  krixano at protonmail.com
Sun May 17 14:44:38 BST 2020

 ```
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ```

--- snip ---

(Just noticed that the email text wasn't wrapping nicely, and this was
the reason.)

Tim

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